


we go together like sound and sight

by AndreaLyn



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/F, M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-27
Updated: 2020-08-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:16:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26143969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndreaLyn/pseuds/AndreaLyn
Summary: Everyone in the world has a soulmark - everyone, apparently, apart from the immortals that Nile calls her family these days. It's impossible, becauseeveryonehas one, so why don't Joe, Nicky, and Andy?
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 59
Kudos: 801





	we go together like sound and sight

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Vampire Weekend's _We Belong Together_!

Learning about what it means to be immortal is like being shoved into a moving race car when you haven’t even learned to drive and told that you’re expected to win the race. 

It’s a _lot_ , Nile is realizing. 

She has more questions than she can keep track of, which is why she writes them all down in a notebook and keeps herself to one a day. It’s not that she’s worried about overwhelming Andy and the others with her questions, it’s more that she’s worried about how much there is to take in. 

One of her questions moves up to the top of her list after a mission in Norway. She and Andy had needed to infiltrate a sauna to stall a mark while Joe and Nicky copied and stole her credentials. Andy, with absolutely no goddamn shame, had walked right into that sauna naked as the day she was born - all those millennia ago. 

It’s definitely a view, one that Nile can’t really avoid and isn’t trying to (mostly because she can’t act like some shy schoolgirl on a mission), but Nile quickly realizes that something is missing.

There isn’t a single black blemish on Andy’s skin. No words, no symbols, nothing. 

Andy doesn’t have a soulmark that Nile can see. 

For Nile, soulmarks have been one of those things that she can explain. She reconciled it with her faith and remained steady knowing that the little mark on her arm represents the person she’s meant to be with. _Everyone_ has a soulmark, so why doesn’t Andy?

If it’s an immortal thing, then why does she have one?

And she remembers that Booker did, because Booker’s had belonged to his wife (a beautiful cherry blossom on his wrist). It’s a question she wants to ask, but not directly to Andy, so instead she goes to Joe and Nicky when they’re preparing dinner together to celebrate a successful recon. 

“Andy doesn’t have a soulmark.”

She’s expecting that to be a bombshell to both men, but they shrug like it’s not a big deal. Nile’s eyes widen, wondering what the hell kind of insanity she’s joined where she can say that and it’s _not_ huge news. If anything, she really would have counted on Joe and Nicky to say something about it.

“Guys, that’s big.”

“Not really,” Joe shares. “Nicky and I don’t have them either.”

Now, _that_ , Nile doesn’t believe. 

“What?” 

Nicky passes Joe the salad bowl and the tongs, shrugging like it isn’t important. “We chose each other and loved one another. The absence of marks were like marks of their own,” he says. “Everyone we knew had something on their skin to tie them to their love, but Joe and I were both blank canvases.” 

Joe shares a secretive smile with Nicky. “It felt...right.”

Nile gapes at them, not entirely sure that she believes them, but short of asking them to strip down and prove that they don’t have any marks, she has to take them at their word. Maybe it’s an immortal thing from before a certain time. From what Nicky and Joe say, Quynh didn’t have a mark either, so maybe if you were born before the year 1000, you just didn’t have a soulmark. 

Something about it doesn’t feel right, but it’s not like Nile knows enough to fight it. 

Instead, she lets it go so it can become a little worry at the back of her mind and little else. 

It resurfaces after a mission that goes very badly, in that Joe and Nicky end up having to spend the night in the basement of their mark’s home, with lice-ridden clothes that have been piling up for years. They end up delivering the man to the local authorities, then they have to deal with the _pests_. 

Andy volunteers to deal with the house and the clothes, walking away before Nile even gets a chance to argue. “Great,” Nile deadpans, “I’m on haircut duty.” 

Both Nicky and Joe look resigned to their fates, which is better than both of them protesting. Nile doesn’t have the patience to deal with men who are nearly a thousand years old having a fit, so she’s glad they’re taking this like champs. Joe settles in the chair in front of her while Nile fetches a razor and clippers and leans her knee against the back of Joe’s chair to start taking away those beautiful curls. 

She’d feel worse, only there’s really no way she wants to chance lice getting into her things, so gone are the curls. She can see the way Nicky is determinedly trying _not_ to watch, which she gets. She’s seen the way Nicky’s fingers card through Joe’s hair when they’re relaxing. She knows exactly how much he loves tenderly sliding his hands through Joe’s hair. 

Then again, she has the feeling that sliding his calloused fingertips over Joe’s freshly-shaven head will have a pretty similar result. 

“I don’t think I’ve shaved my head in…” Joe blinks, gaping at Nicky. “Nicolò, when was the last time you saw me with a shaved head?”

“Like this? At least four hundred years ago,” Nicky says, keeping his distance and flipping through a magazine. “You’re sure this will make sure all the lice get out?” 

Nile works the razor through the next layer of hair, glad that Andy is on burning duty so she doesn’t have to worry about it. “No hair, no lice,” she says, poking her head around to face Joe. “That also means the beard is coming off.”

“Nicky,” Joe sighs, as if entreating him for backup. 

“I will love you all the same,” Nicky snorts, chuckling under his breath as he flips the magazine to the next page. 

Breathing a sigh of relief that Nile can get this over with, she gets out the clippers and the razor to start shearing the last bits of hair off, taking care to make sure it all goes onto the sheet on the ground so she can bundle it up and burn it when she’s done with Nicky. They might not be so attached to their hair, but that doesn’t mean Nile wants to be in the same situation. 

Joe closes his eyes and relaxes back into the chair as Nile does her work, brushing away the last traces of his beard with a cloth before she steps around to do the same to his hair. 

Nile brushes her fingers over the back of Joe’s scalp, frowning when it looks like she’s missed a spot. She ducks back in with the razor to get it, but when she gets closer, she can see it’s not a patch of hair at all, but a _mark_. She sucks in a breath sharply, gaping at it, her eyes tracking back to Nicky.

Did he really not know? All this time?

Because that’s a small ink-colored moon on Joe’s skin, as clear a soulmark if she’s ever seen one. “Nicky,” she says in a hurry. “Get over here and let me shave your head.”

“What?” Nicky and Joe echo as one frantic, confused echo. Nicky’s protest, strangely, is dwarfed by Joe’s. 

“I was going to do it,” Joe protests.

“I don’t care who does it, just sit down,” she says, pushing at Nicky’s shoulders to get him into the chair. Nicky frowns as he gives Joe a despondent look, but resigns himself to his fate as Nile eagerly buzzes off his hair. 

Without hair, Nicky looks...well, Nile tells herself that it’ll grow back soon enough and he won’t resemble someone who’d look better in a leather jacket on a motorcycle on his way to a punk-rock concert. That’s not what she cares about, though. 

She turns the razor off and Nicky turns to thank her, but she grabs his chin and forces him to look forward. 

“Careful how you touch him,” Joe warns, his voice steely.

“Shut up, you’ll thank me in a second,” Nile says, following her hunch. She ducks down to see if what she’s looking for is there. Sure enough, it’s at the nape of Nicky’s neck, clear as day. It’s a small sun, the same size and style as the moon on Joe’s neck and in the exact same position. 

God, they’re idiots. 

“You two have always had soulmarks, you just didn’t know where to look.” She hauls Nicky with her to stand behind Joe, pointing out the little moon that’s dotting his skin. She steps behind Nicky and lets Joe marvel at the mark that’s been there as long as they’ve both been alive, probably. 

Joe’s eyes are wide, as if he’s suddenly made the world’s most important discovery. Bigger than the Titanic, than all the treasures in the world, than the world’s best kept secrets. His hands shake as he lifts them, reverently cupping Nicky’s neck to stroke his thumb against the mark while Nicky crowds into Joe’s space to do the same.

“All this time,” Joe murmurs, “you were my moon and sun.”

“It wouldn’t have changed a thing,” Nicky reminds him.

“It still means _everything_.”

Nile watches the tender scene before her, eyes misty with emotion as they kiss like new men, meeting one another for the first time. Then, as the kiss grows more heated and desperate, she thinks _shit_ as Joe drags Nicky closer by hooking his leg around his hip and dragging him in. There’s no mistaking what’s about to happen. Nile bends down to collect the lice-infested hair in the sheet, balling it up as she eyes the door, debating her escape.

She guesses that she deserves it for sticking around after telling two immortal men in love with each other that they really are soulmates after all. 

Nile clears her throat, but that does nothing to hush Joe’s tender, “ _amore mio_ ” or Nicky’s, “ _habib albi_ ”. She makes the sound again, to remind them that she’s there, but they keep touching each other’s marks with soft reverent brushes of their fingers, kisses that make Nile squirm a little because there were lice _just there_ , but neither man seems to care.

 _Fuck this_. 

She grabs her jacket and keys along with the sheet to dispose of in the nearest dumpster outside, locking the door behind her as she goes. As she leaves, it’s just in time to run across their fearless leader. 

“I’m going to the cafe,” Nile says to Andy as she passes her outside, returning from the burning trip. “You should come with me,” she says. 

Andy opens her mouth and points inside like she’s about to tell Nile that she left her sweater in there or her axe or something else that might have been safe to get up until about five minutes ago.

Nile grabs her elbow, eyes wide and determined. “No, Andy,” she says, her words firm. “You should come with me,” she says again. 

Andy’s gaze slides to the apartments behind Nile. She narrows her eyes a little, like she’s evaluating the situation, then gives a sort of knowing little humming noise. She never says that she knows what’s going on, never even hints that she understands Nile’s need to run. 

All she does is calmly turn around to join Nile, commenting idly, “I could use a macaron.” 

Hopefully, by the time Andy is finished her macarons and her tea and Nile has ingested at least three lattes, Joe and Nicky will have burned through the most passionate of their affections, discovering that they’re soulmates almost a thousand years in.

And if they haven’t? Well, then Nile is going to go to a corner store, buy a spray bottle, and _they_ can be exiled to a coffee shop where they’ll get into all kinds of trouble if they touch each other the way she suspects they’re doing right now.

* * *

It turns out that Nicky and Joe had been close to the truth in their belief that the absence of marks had been a mark. They’d been wrong, of course, but not entirely. 

It’s months later that she finds out that they’d been _so_ close to the truth, and it takes Nile going to the source for the answer. Finally, after another run-in with Quynh and with the topic on her mind, she screws up her courage and just does it.

“You don’t have a soulmark,” Nile says bluntly when she’s got Andy alone.

“No.”

“Why?”

Andy barely glances up from where she’s sharpening her labrys. “The last time we went up against Quynh, on the boat,” she reminds her. “Did you see anything on her?”

Nile had really tried _not_ to look, seeing as Quynh had her clothes cut off by Joe’s scimitar in the skirmish, before she’d dived, naked, over the edge of the yacht. “No,” she says, squinting at her to understand if she’s really pulling the same shit that Joe and Nicky tried with her.

“Everyone has a soulmark that I’ve ever met,” Andy says, and given the sheer magnitude of her history, that number might almost be closer to infinity than anything Nile could comprehend. “Everyone,” she confirms. “Even Joe and Nicky did, even if they didn’t want to recognize that they did.”

“You knew?”

“They might have said they didn’t have them, but they touched them, constantly,” Andy says with a snort. “I saw it one night when Joe was sleeping, when his hair was shorn short about four centuries back. I knew they had marks, but they had deluded themselves with someone else’s reality. With mine,” she says calmly. “I let them have it. One way or the other, they belonged to each other, the way I belong to Quynh.”

If everyone in the world has a mark of some kind, and Andy and Quynh don’t…

“Your lack of marks are your soulmark,” Nile says, echoing Joe and Nicky’s theory. “You belong to each other through an absence of proof. You have _faith_ that you’re soulmates.”

Andy stares off into the distance and Nile doesn’t have to ask what she’s thinking about. She’s watching the ships come into port, wondering which of them Quynh is on, which of them they’ll infiltrate next, to attempt to talk sense into a madwoman. 

“I don’t need a mark to know she’s mine. She has my heart and I have hers,” Andy replies with a steely confidence that Nile has never known; at least, not about love. “One day, if I ever get her back, if the woman I knew is still in there, I’ll have to account for the fact that I let the other half of me go and stopped looking, but that doesn’t change the fact that I am hers and she is mine.”

Nile rubs her mark, the musical notes on her inner elbow making her feel _lonely_ , of all things. One day, someone will come along and she’ll understand why this mark, why these notes, why music, but it’s not today.

Today, she knows that Joe and Nicky are back in the safehouse with their hair grown out, their marks covered, but they’re both still living in the bliss of belonging to one another and having physical proof of that fact. Somewhere out there, today, Booker’s mark taunts him with memories of the past and she has to wonder what he might have tried in the past to try and lose that reminder. 

Today, Andy is unblemished, but not untouched because Quynh got there first and claimed a piece of her that no mark was needed for.

Everyone’s got a soulmark, even when they don’t.

It sets Nile’s heart at ease, because this whole immortal thing might be new to her, but at least it turns out that there are some old familiar things that haven’t changed after all.


End file.
